Crashing and burning.

I'm feeling burnt out. I can't give 100% to each aspect of grad student life still, and I'm not really even getting any time where I can be less stressed.

I do take at least one day off a week where I do less work. I refuse to go into lab at all on that day, and usually just grade or do homework + one fun thing (yesterday I went to a museum with the boy). I'm falling behind on my running schedule hardcore due to a slight injury/constant working. And lets be honest, it's more due to the constant working.

I'm hoping that it gets better soon. But since this irritating quarter system means that I have a repeating cycle of one week without midterms and then two weeks of midterms, not likely. I'm mostly looking forward to classes being done with (unless a fellowship requires me to take more) at the end of next quarter. TAing continues until this time next year.

Ok, here's hoping for less pointless, time-wasting experiments this week to make me feel better. There's nothing more discouraging than making slides for the weekly meeting with the boss and seeing how few experiments I actually did, let alone how little worked.

Missing my undergrad friends hardcore today. That one's not going to change anytime soon though.

Happy two days from half priced chocolate day!

I hope that you all celebrate in your own way. My way of celebrating Valentine's Day (making pancakes for a bunch of friends, whether I'm single or not...which is a good time to bring up that I have been seeing a fellow biochem first year) will have to be postponed until later this week, as I have a midterm Wednesday and an ongoing take home midterm for my inorganic NMR course.

Boo. Thanks, grad school.

And now, back to my massive pile 'o grading.

Favorite wombat fail of the week: When doing distillations, I had 3 flooded hoods due to wombat antics.

Fun.

Not going to lie, feeling pretty down right now.

I just returned home from the lecture for the course that I TA. It's a huge lecture hall, and it's late at night. Understandably, the lecturer for this course tries to grab the wombat attention by being a wee bit risque---not terribly so most of the time.

But sometimes, what he says just makes me really uncomfortable. Tonight was one of those nights.

He asked the wombats if there were any chem engineers in this course. One girl raised her hand. After asking her if she'd heard of a concept, he proceeded onwards in his lecture, occasionally asking her if she'd heard of other concepts. After the third concept, he asked her if she knew anything and if she was really going to be an engineer (none of these concepts were covered until today). Then he directly launched into a story about how home moms used to be referred to as "domestic engineers."

WTF.

First of all, you singled out this student and then implied that the sort of engineer she'd become was a "domestic engineer" because she doesn't know everything about engineering yet, which of course she should as a sophomore. Secondly, if you've already apologized to the whole class before due to your previous terribly inappropriate/sexually charged comment about a specific female student, why would you continue to push the envelope too far? Plus, he even stopped himself going, "I shouldn't say this." LISTEN TO YOUR DAMN SELF.

Maybe I'm the only one offended by the implication that this female student would have to be a housewife to be a type of engineer. But no matter his intentions---even though he clarified that he knew that statement was inappropriate---a student went home and probably is questioning her major choice right now due to his actions.

Help a biochemist out?

Are you doing mol bio or biochem or anything where you're trying to get a mutation to go into a genome?

We've got this system where we can easily get a plasmid with our copy of the gene with the mutation. However, we have to transform into a system where this mutated copy of the gene needs to get into all of the copies of the gene within the native system (otherwise we'll have 75% mutated protein and 25% wild type protein). We've already got antibiotic resistance as a selector, but cells that transform partially still grow. We've got another type of nutrient related selection. But we keep on getting not the full mutation back when we sequence it because our screening system isn't selecting for just the cells where the mutation is in every copy of the gene.

Anyone out there got some awesome ideas for screening? I'm looking and racking my brain, but this is not my field of expertise.

When the adviser's away...

...the grad students will work the same hours anyways.

In undergrad, when I went in on Sunday, there would maybe be one other person in there. Today when I went in (I usually work M-Sat as compared to Sun-Fri), 80% of my lab was in.

The boss-man is out all week, so looking forward to a less tense week that is *not* filled with grant writing. My project is still stuck on mol bio related stuff (ick---perhaps the most frustrating stuff to be stuck on as a chemist), but hopefully will move into the more exciting stages of growing/characterizing mutants within the next week. I am itching to no longer follow my grad student mentor around, but due to inherent trickiness in my protein, not a possibility. Sigh.

Though I must not be driving her nutso yet. We're going to a free yoga class together later this week with one of her friends from another lab.

Also, I seem to have collected a fan group out of some of my ochem wombats. A lot of them wish me good weekends in their emails/when they leave lab, a few found out about my half and ask me questions about that, and one of them hangs around until after lab and then she'll follow me back to my lab building asking for ochem advice/questions about my research and whatnot. It's all very cute. Though if they're hoping for points, my wombats have been severely disappointed. And with that, I'll leave you with one of my favorite wombat quotes from a lab report graded earlier this week, in which a major point of the lab was to learn about bumping and boiling chips:

Q: Why do we use boiling chips?
A: To make liquid boil.

It's true, wombat. That's why when making spaghetti I always include a boiling chip.

I'm not dead!

Guess what guys? I'm only *slightly* dead!

Just kidding. Sorta.

These past few weeks have been...ridiculous. Here's the lowdown:
1. The prof I'm TAing ochem lab for is a total jerk who is very good at wasting my time.
2. I got super sick with a major cold for the first week of school.
3. I'm working 6 days a week in lab, with a 7:30 am start time. My classes are at night so I don't leave campus until 8 or 9 pm. This is rather brutal.
4. I am in a love/hate relationship with TAing.
5. I have not read a research paper for weeks and I'm falling farther behind.
6. Ran my first half marathon with a time of 2:10!
7. My PI is submitting a grant on my project that is due at the end of this week. Since the other grad student on this project has been fulfilling all of his figure and rewrite related requests, I've been doing her labwork and mine. I am very glad for this week to end soon.
8. My first midterm of my x-ray crystallography class is tomorrow.

Unsurprisingly, I feel as if I'm doing a shitty job at all 4 categories of my life: lab, school, TAing, and running.

Even though I am stressed out, I still am vaguely enjoying all of this. For some reason.

Happy 2011!

Things that are mindboggling to me:
1. I have now joined a group. Whaaaaaaaaaaaa
2. Classes start tomorrow.
3. I'm TAing again for the first time since my two year stint of TAing in undergrad.
4. I already have too many things to do tomorrow.
5. My half is in 21 days!
6. How is it that people always want to meet at the exact same time as things that I have scheduled?
7. Visiting/interviewing potential grad students start up in a month and a half. Whoa.